Doubting Droplets
by Dorozhand
Summary: A short vignette in three movements, three perspectives. The pain of doubt ripples through the sea of lilim as the sun rises over another uncertain dawn in Tokyo-3. Three children stand by the sea and ruminate on the present, the past, and the things to come. One has survived when in another world she might have died. Such is the fickle nature of fate and death.


Orange light reflects off the eye of a young boy standing motionless by the sea; orange light which bounced across a vast, deep sky to touch the face of one who stands and observes it. Does this mean anything? You query yourself when another is not near, a question whose answer is beyond your reach, whose meaning is beyond your thought. But is anything beyond your thought? Anything at all?

Troubling the clear mind with questions, when the orange lucidity asks none. You try to resume your motionlessness of mind and memory, to no avail. The sun rises and a city awakens to another dawn, to doubt and to fear for the future. Your future. Our future? Misato once told you the future of all is in the hands of the three who fight for it, in the hand of you among the three who had been chosen and will choose. But what do you fight for? The approval, the expectation, the commanding flow that coerces you to be as others want you to be when all you want is peace and nothingness and quietude with your silent sojourning solace. But the future is frightful now; cloudy and reticent to keep walking on. You feel how others feel the death without hope of redemption fill their souls without god nor savior to help them, encapsulating them in the closing dark. You feel as they feel, alone and abandoned. The orange light of dawn fears nothing, but you who are a disturbance in the clear pool of the universe cast doubt as ripples across this pool, and the orange light fills you with emptiness to quench you; put out your fire which you cannot help but to burn.

You fight to clear your mind of conflict. You fight to cast away the doubt and reach inwards to touch the silent calm. When you fight, you are at peace in your purpose and your pain, and others are forgotten. When you scream, you are at one with the universe of screams echoing in darkness. When you die, you will rejoin the nothingness whence you came. You long for this release, which in your cowardice and apathy you cannot bring unto yourself. This is the flow of your mind, and your disharmony echoes across the placid sea, and mixes with the sound of song which whines its tone of hope beyond god to shatter the silence and draw forth the calamity of the will into the pellucid void. Ode to Joy... You recognize the tune-

Orange light reflects off the eye of another young boy today. Dawn breaks upon the glassy cornea of this boy whose knowledge betrays nothing on his cool and contented face. Within is as without with them; placid as the unbroken pool. No turmoil of separated joy and fear and anxiety dances with and like to the fire of the soul, and no solace is needed by the drop which makes no ripple and leaves no disturbance where it touched the sea and was enjoined with its own and made not itself anymore. That which was always silent needs no refuge from the noise, but that which was always silent is thundered by the sound of song; by the feeling of pain unlooked for and unwanted.

My mission is clear to me. My choice is made for me and I will walk unbending and unbreaking from my path so burnished and melted into my rising soul. Orange sun beams a lonely quiet, and I will to bring forth of my body a song to break it. Like the burning will which enters into calm and brings chaos; like the light which kills the darkness in its being, its mission to reveal and make visible, I sing that song of hope. It endears me to my companion, so filled with human doubt and fear, so vexed by the swirling of the troubled soul, frayed at the edges with pain and the creeping and crashing and crushing of death; death closing in to devour and make nothing. My ode to joy births willing magnificence in him, and all is moving verily towards its appointed end. I have made my choice, my choice has been made for me. I have been made for my choice. I walk unhindered and unmoved. There is no alternative to what will happen, and this other will do what must be done.

I choose because I am choice. I go forwards to an end which is and will not change, which must be and I will not falter in it. I am made, and I will be unmade, and my mother will know me when I am called unto her. The white seed is, the black seed could be. The white seed calls me, and I will come. This boy whose ears receive me and whose heart beats faster for my song will guide and bring about and crash outwards to be found among the highest of the high, the power among all powers. The power of choice. My power. My domain. My absolute. There is no alternative.

Orange light reflects off the eye of a young girl. Orange light which progressed through nothingness and flowed through pupils into placid eyes, played like a projected film for the mind which emerged and will return. Normalcy is silence, loneliness is death and is good. Purpose is living to die and you who have avoided your purpose will soon die. You who have sought purpose in living and not death will return to your appointed road and on the night-road will disappear into the sojourn of the quiet.

You are that which has been created for a purpose. You try to keep your mind from straying from the nigh-road and you focus on the peace that will come to your will in death and inevitable destruction. You attempt to spurn the rising that causes you to fear, to want so searingly to break away from the dark and to reach for the hand that clasps the warmth, to pointlessly live to not die, and to die anyway. They that do this have no purpose; your purpose has been made for you, and your desire should only be to serve that purpose and to do no other, to stand and to be killed, to break apart and be unmade. You who will be unmade need not the warmth which is clasped by the other, though your heart betrays your reticence with faster and faster beating, hotter and hotter turmoil; doubt. It is doubt that you fear. It is doubt that ripples in the stillness of your pool of orange light. You survived the EVA, you were wrapped in the angel's affection for your living and your breathing and your fear of death in the name of bending the blade of fate from your little heart which now still beats to the torture of your being.

Abandoned, you think. He was, by the one who guides your purpose, by the father who knew you and kept you and made you for his mission. Your purpose brings him pain, suffering for you who are without value except that you may serve your appointed role. You suffer, in fear that your appointed role will bring you to the nothingness which you have always desired? Why do you fear this? You attempt once more to silence your troubling voices, to bring forth of will the peace of death and tranquility of the void, but burning your will and your body is the core of the angel that saved you for another purpose you did not understand. Burning in your body is the heart of your doubt, the will to keep walking that falters in the warmth. The son who knows your nature and your fate who held you with his hands which tremble with that same fear and apprehension and uncertainty; his face burns against yours. Your will, once unmoved, quakes with your feelings and your love. It is. That which you feared. That word which you did not understand.

You will tell him. You must. Come what may, whether or not your fate is inevitable you feel that you must reach out and connect. Two drops ripple together, bound by the tension which is broken by their contact. In pellucidity they are content, and you must act. There may be something. There may be nothing. But there between them is the moving will that breaks the surface in the name of being and existing, and you are glad as you run along the streets of Tokyo-3, exalting in your rapidly beating heart as your light footsteps carry you towards your new destination, your unappointed fate which is unknown to you but which you must follow. It is you who will create this fate, it is you who wills it that there be life and difference and disturbance. He will hear you and you will be heard. There is an alternative.

How many worlds have come before me;  
yet to be, not yet to be believ'd?  
A thought emerges from the void,  
yet still in aching doubt is wreath'd  
before it sinks, returns to be  
destroy'd.

Cold, Warm? I'm not. Feel? -wish that _I_ could...  
Sojourn of the longest ways away  
's a song that I remember still,  
that bleak nor shriek cannot essay  
to kill. When all I know is blood?  
the _will_.

You see? I don't. The river steam's curl'd  
down ten thousand years so near this ground.  
 _You_ , seeing, maybe claim you saw,  
but knowing, _here_ exalted sound  
when lightning struck the sleeping world  
in awe.

Below you now, this homeland's drumming;  
 _there_ the night-road meets the mountain-peak  
continuing into the sky.  
So lonely at the threshold; weak,  
once more the lark will calmly sing,  
 _"good-bye."_

No more around when all has ended.  
Hopeless, yet without despair, I stand  
and operate this pounding heart,  
tinnitus of the modern man.  
Alas, will I and all be dead;  
 _apart-_

In all the depth, a desolation  
rises forth of thought in new relief.  
Such irony that we should think.  
So loftily brief time and thief  
alike upon the ship, begun  
to sink.

Destroy'd, the thought before its sinking.  
Doubting worlds are aching to emerge,  
returning to the void, the still  
that wreathes me. Endlessly diverge  
to break one final benzene ring  
 _until-_


End file.
